[lit-ideas] Empire: war and propaganda

Empire: war and propaganda 
John Pilger
Monday 31st July 2006 
 
 
The US role in supporting Israel?s military assault on
Lebanon falls into a pattern of imperial tyranny,
where history is rewritten to suit America?s needs
while Europe stands cravenly by. John Pilger provides
a personal assessment from Washington  

 
The National Museum of American History is part of the
celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their
soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and
chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire,
though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is
understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini
were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to
rid the world of evil", as President Bush has also
said. 

One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price
of Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of
Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism
helps us understand how silence and omission are so
successfully deployed in free, media-saturated
societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people,
many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious
message that America has always "built freedom and
democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where
the atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in
Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined to
stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same
true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented
precision". 

The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only
fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great
mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted
overthrow of 50 governments, many of them democracies,
along with the crushing of popular movements
struggling against tyranny and the bombing of 30
countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In
central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming
and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000
people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as
genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto.
Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can
venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and
knowing nothing about their own. 

In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's
honest People's History of the United States, or I F
Stone's revelation of the truth of what the museum
calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's
definition of patriotism as the need to keep
"multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy
expense to grab slices of other people's countries".
Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US
Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for
just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include
Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is
taken. 

To understand the power of indoctrination in free
societies is also to understand the subversive power
of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in
Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been
embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's
Messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their
pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the
blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide
that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an
exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to
rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority
and promote "the imposition of western values", as
Niall Ferguson puts it. 

Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that
covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and
today's ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code
for race and class is "culture". Thus, the enduring,
piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against
the poor and weak, especially those with natural
resources, has become a "clash of civilisations".
Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end
of history" (since recanted), the task of the
revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to
popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War
of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent
soundbites on the BBC. In this way, the public is
"softened up" for the rapacious invasion of countries
on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear
attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an
executive dictatorship, as called for by
Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that
a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the
Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the
Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the
majority opinion - in a high court Bush himself
stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal
quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all
powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the
same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and
whether her editary, self-appointed, or elective, may
justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." 

The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of
such an imperial tyranny. It is clearly a US-ordained
operation, with the long-planned assault on Gaza and
the destruction of Leba non pretexts for a wider
campaign with the goal of installing American puppets
in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off
time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan
Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled
Empire." 

The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and
eternal hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent
weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion
force was captured and held, legitimately, as a
prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set
off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The
seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before
the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither
was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian
hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many
of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped
soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into
Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had
staged a phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of
Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in
inanities about "recognising Israel", along with
Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a
500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as
many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the
most densely populated places on earth and the nightly
terrorising with sonic booms. 

"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared
the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children
went out of their minds. In their defence, the
Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and
killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's
victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a
shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives". The
historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi
bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw
Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two
narratives". 

Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a
hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for
Israel" apparently seeking rapture - I have heard only
the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah,
drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed
and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an
attack on those countries, while remaining silent
about America's $3bn-a-day gift of planes and small
arms and bombs to a state whose international
lawlessness is a registered world record. There is
never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a
response to the atrocities and humiliations the
Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so
Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel
Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which
left 22,000 people dead. There is never mention that
Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in
the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine,
having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people
from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and
schools. There is never mention that the threat to
Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of
its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an
imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as
the antithesis of humane Judaism. 

Government silence 

The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the
heart of the matter. While European governments (with
the honourable exception of the Swiss) have remained
craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the
Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no
media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand
during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones
most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie
and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither
is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On
a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and
promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say,
without serious challenge, that "human life is not
cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other
side is quite cheap actually . . ." 

Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an
Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with
grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman -
and there have been many of them - screams in pain as
she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at
an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused
right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch
the child's father carry his newborn across freezing
fields until it turns blue and dies. 

I think Orwell got it right in this passage from
Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire: 

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in .
. . practices which had been long abandoned -
imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners
as slaves, public executions, torture to extract
confessions . . . and the deportation of whole
populations - not only became common again, but were
tolerated and even defended by people who considered
themselves enlightened and progressive." 

John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is
published by Bantam Press (£17.99)  
 
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
For the latest in current and cultural affairs take
out a print or online subscription.  


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